Abstract
Digital Games are a genuine part of convergence culture because their structure can become the subject of participatory practices. This generates special needs on the side of the computer game industry to manage and steer the relationship to its customers. The article focuses on this relationship between the game industry and its customers and outlines it as a form of cooperation. A short archeology of so-called editor games serves as a starting point. Editor games refers to a specific software genre, in which the users are offered design possibilities within a relatively confined framework. The article continues by elaborating the limits and possibilities of co-creative practices afforded by these software programs in order to trace the changing material conditions of a participatory computer game culture as a whole. It shows that editor games act as mediators within a precarious relationship between the media industry and the consumers. The aim of this approach is to explore the role of editor games in initiating and maintaining cooperative relationships between the computer game industry and its customers.
This article is a revised and translated version of Abend: “Editorenspiele” (2018).
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- 1.
The concept of convergence is not used in the sense of media convergence, but in relation to the entanglement of the spheres of production and consumption. This facet of convergence is part of the participatory culture and includes practices by which consumers actively acquire and change content. See Postigo: “Video Game Appropriation through Modifications” (2008, p. 60).
- 2.
“[M]eta-design, suggests to defer some design and participation until after the design project, and open up for use as design, design at use time or ‘design-after-design’” (Ehn 2008, p. 92).
- 3.
See Au: “Triumph of the Mod” (2002). Co-creative players are accordingly referred to as “modders” and the artefacts resulting from the activity of modding are referred to as “mods”, short for modifications.
- 4.
There is talk of 80% of all files. See Arakji and Lang (2007).
- 5.
Shortly after the release of the first beta version, Valve bought the rights to Counter Strike and hired both hobby game designers as game developers.
- 6.
- 7.
There were also listings of computer viruses. One of the first boot sector viruses for the Atari ST was allegedly spread via a listing in the German magazine Atari Spezial. Cf. http://st-news.com/uvk-book/the-book/part-i-the-uvk-book/history-of-viruses-on-atari-tos-computers/.
- 8.
A research in the archive of the Computerspielemuseum Berlin showed 35 titles for the period 1983–998, which can be assigned to this genre.
- 9.
A common practice today is therefore to film built scenarios and share them on platforms, such as YouTube and Twitch, or to make their own creations available to others for playing within sharing infrastructures such as the PlayStation Network.
- 10.
More general calls were found on the product packaging of other titles. On the back of Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set it said: “We’re an association of electronic artists who share a common goal. We want to fulfill the potential of personal computing. That’s a tall order. But with enough imagination and enthusiasm we think there’s a good chance for success. Our products like this program, are evidence of our intent. If you like to get involved, please write us at: Electronic Arts, 2755 Campus Drive, San Mateo, CA 94403.”.
- 11.
- 12.
This reading gives more weight to technological necessities and economic calculations than to the statements of individual game developers who state that they want to give their fans more power over the game design. For example, DOOM developer John Carmack talks about ID software wanting to turn the game into a “screen” to enable downstream, secondary production processes. See Poremba: “Patches of Peace” (2003, p. 4).
- 13.
For example, the development studio Bohemia Interactive briefly attracted media attention after an anonymous user integrated units of the so-called Islamic state into the military simulation Arma 3 (2013). See Abend: “Greetings Arma fans. I submit to you this humble contribution to the mod-a-verse” (2016).
- 14.
“Participatory culture in video games and among fans in general, because it appropriates commercial content, clashes against the “commodity culture” of the cultural industries that seek to control the form and flow of cultural goods” (Postigo 2007, p. 71).
- 15.
The motto of LittleBigPlanet is “Play, Create, Share”.
- 16.
The differences between the two titles must be highlighted at this point. Minecraft offers more possibilities for recombination and redesign. This results in an opening towards the wider modding scene with its own server infrastructure, supported by relatively stable networks, which has allowed longer-term communities of practice to develop, also because the software allows more far-reaching manipulations of the game world than those permitted in the game. In contrast, LittleBigPlanet is largely tied to the infrastructure provided by the operators.
- 17.
Boluk and Lemieux (2017) propose the term “metagaming for perspective”: “Rather than collecting the artifacts and chronicling the history of videogames as if they were stable, static, separate objects, Metagaming attempts to uncover alternate histories of play defined not by code, commerce, and computation but by the diverse practices and material discontinuities that emerge between the human experience of playing videogames and their nonhuman operations” (p. 4).
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Abend, P. (2020). Editor Games: Digital Construction Kits at the Beginning and End of a Participatory Gaming Culture. In: Abend, P., Beil, B., Ossa, V. (eds) Playful Participatory Practices. Perspektiven der Game Studies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28619-4_4
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